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"A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth's climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century. On a 1987 voyage to the Antarctic, the paleoceanographer James Kennett and his crew dropped anchor in the Weddell Sea, drilled into the seabed, and extracted a vertical cylinder of sediment. In an inch-thick layer of plankton fossils and other detritus buried more than 500 feet deep, they found a disturbing clue about the planet's past that could spell disaster for the future. Lower in the sediment core, fossils abounded from 60 plankton species. But in that thin cross-section from about 56 million years ago, the number of species dropped to 17. And the planktons' oxygen and carbon isotope compositions had dramatically changed. Kennett and his student Lowell Stott deduced from the anomalous isotopes that carbon dioxide had flooded the air, causing the ocean to rapidly acidify and heat up, in a process similar to what we are seeing today."

"Back in the 1980s, a group of social workers in Jamaica visited low-income homes one hour a week for two years, bearing age-appropriate toys for the kids and advice on child rearing for the parents. Researchers tracked the outcomes, and a generation later, the results are in. The children whose homes were visited by social workers became adults who earn wages that are 25 percent higher than those earned by peers who had not been visited. Their I.Q.s are an average seven points higher, and they are less likely to resort to crime or suffer from depression. Other studies, including several recent ones in the United States, have shown similar results, contributing to a consensus on the importance of early childhood development that has led governments around the world to increase spending on the first five years of life. In Latin America and the Caribbean, a region of longstanding social and economic inequality, several countries have been especially ambitious. Brazil and Chile doubled the coverage of day care services over the past decade, while in Ecuador they grew sixfold. These investments build on historic gains in child nutrition and health. But while Latin American children are now healthier and more likely to attend preschool, they still lag far behind in learning, particularly in the areas of language and cognition, when compared with their counterparts in wealthy countries. What are we doing wrong? ..."

Muy interesante herramienta para pasar tablas de datos a visualizaciones gráficas, en vectores y personalizables... "RAW works with tabular data (i.e. information which is possible to record or track in a spreadsheet). There are many ways you can upload your data in RAW: Dropping a plain text file containing delimiter-separated values such as .csv or .tsv. File extension does not matter, as long as you use one of these delimters: comma, semicolon, tab or colon. Copying and pasting your data from a spreadsheet (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, Apple Numbers...) or a text file. This is particularly helpful when you do not want to (or can not) export your data any time you change it or when you want to use only specific columns. Typing your data directly into the text area. While it is unlikely to use this option, it can be useful for editing your data."

"Striking evidence has emerged that an ancient virus previously known only from fossil evidence has persistently infected some humans at very low levels for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. This ancient retrovirus is a kind of living fossil, and the discovery of an intact copy of it within the human genome poses questions as to how it has survived, and suggests others from the distant evolutionary past may lie dormant in the DNA of many species. ..."

Artículo en inglés... "Mobile devices as teaching tools are becoming a more and more common part of the American education experience in classrooms, from preschool through graduate school. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 58% of U.S. teachers own smartphones - 10 percentage points higher than the national average for adults. Those teachers are building that tech-savviness into their lesson plans, too, by embracing bring-your-own-device policies and leading the push for an iPad for every student. In 2013, an estimated 25% of U.S. schools had BYOD policies in place and it's reasonable to assume those numbers have risen in the past two years. ..."

"Max Roser (2016) - 'World Poverty'. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-prosperity/world-poverty/ In the past only a small elite lived a life without poverty. Since the onset of industrialization - and as a consequence of this, economic growth1 - the share of people living in poverty started decreasing and has kept on falling ever since. But as a consequence of falling poverty, the health of the population improved dramatically over the last two centuries, and the population started to grow.2 The growth of the population caused the absolute number of poor people in the world to increase; only recently has the absolute number of people living in poverty started to fall as well. This data entry chronicles the falling poverty over the last centuries."

The Atlantic covers consequential news and ideas in politics, business, entertainment, technology, health, education, and global affairs.

"Hace días en una de las charlas a profesores aula, los docentes compartían sus mayores dificultades en la sala del siglo XXI. Una que era común a todos, era la resistencia general de los niños a investigar, aprender, trabajar lo que ya se encuentra en Google. ¿Por qué hacer lo que ya está? ¿Por qué crear lo que puedo encontrar en la web y en tantas versiones como un alumno podría soñar? A lo que se le sumaba la doble tarea que significaba evaluar las fuentes que habían utilizado los niños o el porcentaje de copy/paste que habían incorporado. La tarea era cuesta arriba, primero motivarlos, luego pasar horas eternas evaluando y contrastando en la web, la originalidad del trabajo. Obviamente la respuesta fue clara, si no establecen el aprendizaje como un desafío continuo, tendrán en el aula hábiles boicoteadores. Los Hijos de la Tecnología viven, navegan y existen en la Internet, por ende dominan todo lo que en ella sucede y ante el mínimo esfuerzo, usarán lo que se encuentra en ella para luego compartirlo con sus pares. Son prácticos, optimizan su tiempo y asumen que todo lo que no les aporta es un mero trámite que es necesario cumplir. Desarrollar nuevas estrategias de aprendizaje son existenciales tanto como comprender que en la sala de clases hay nuevos niños que piensan, crean y comparten de manera diametralmente diferente que hace décadas atrás. ¿Qué hacer? Proponer nuevos espacios de aprendizaje. Hace años opté por el mundo digital ocupando plataformas, blogs, redes, donde no solo publico todos los contendidos a trabajar en el año, también las evaluaciones y recursos digitales para que los padres participen. Versiones diferentes para cada tema, dependiendo de las habilidades y competencias naturales de los alumnos. Dejarlo liderar, cooperar, alimentar su senda de crecimiento personal. Hace mucho tiempo deje de ser quien protagoniza la clase, si alguien ingresara a ella, vería una colmena en acción, donde a lo más soy

"Call it counterintuitive clickbait if you must, but Forbes' Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry made an intriguing argument when he granted the title of "Language of the Future" to French, of all tongues. "French isn't mostly spoken by French people and hasn't been for a long time now," he admits," but "the language is growing fast, and growing in the fastest-growing areas of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The latest projection is that French will be spoken by 750 million people by 2050. One study "even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin." I don't know about you, but I can never believe in any wave of the future without a traceable past. But the French language has one, of course, and a long and storied one at that. You see it visualized in the information graphic above (also available in suitable-for-framing prints!) created by Minna Sundberg, author of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent. "When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor," writes Mental Floss' Arika Okrent. "An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian)." Sundberg takes this tree metaphor to a delightfully lavish extreme, tracing, say, how Indo-European linguistic roots sprouted a variety of modern-day living languages including Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Italian - and, of course, our Language of the Future. The size of the branches and bunches of leaves represent the number of speakers of each language at different times: the likes of English and Spanish have sprouted into mighty vegetative clusters, while others, like, Swedish, Dutch, and Punjabi, assert a more local dominance over their own, separately grown regional branches. Will French's now-modest leave

These 'warming stripe' graphics are visual representations of the change in temperature as measured in each country over the past 100+ years. Each stripe represents the temperature in that country averaged over a year. For most countries, the stripes start in the year 1901 and finish in 2018. For the UK, USA, Switzerland & Germany, the data starts in the late 19th century.

"This comic is a timeline on how the temperature has changed from 20,000 BCE (Before Common Era) to the present day (2016), with three predictions for the rest of the 21st century depending on what actions are taken (or not taken) to stop CO₂ emission. This comic is a direct, but much more thorough, follow up on the previous global warming comic: 1379: 4.5 Degrees. By having readers scroll through millennia of slow-paced natural changes, Randall uses the comic to confront the the rapid temperature rise in the recent years. Over the past 100 years, human action has produced a large amount of CO₂ emissions, which have caused a rise in average global temperature through the greenhouse effect. This is called global warming and is part of a climate change, a subject that has become a recurrent subject on xkcd. There are still many people who claim that this is not happening, or at least that it is not caused by any human actions, called climate change deniers. One argument of theirs is that global warming is happening for natural causes, summarized with the phrase "temperature has changed before". "

"Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth's long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species, and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail."

"Fourble turns lists of .mp3 files into podcasts. Point it at some audio files hosted anywhere online, and it'll turn them into a podcast feed which you can subscribe to and share. To make a podcast from an archive.org collection, just paste in its URL (eg. https://archive.org/details/Quiet_Please) and Fourble will fetch all the details automatically."

"Mientras tanto, la deslegitimación de los docentes existentes (en su gran mayoría mujeres) pulula en los medios y en la política, dentro de un sistema escolar que no exhibe mejoras desde tiempos clementinos. Y la deslegitimación no es gratis: la violencia se ha invertido y se ejerce ahora contra las maestras por parte de una sociedad que se suicida con la burda impugnación de sus educadores. Mitificar el pasado y estereotipar el presente impide apoyar a los docentes en una tarea cada vez más complicada, frenando todo atisbo de cambio real para así convalidar violencias, reverenciar fantasmas, alabar héroes y exorcizar demonios en un combate en el que la degradación educativa ya no presenta rivales."